Rockhill Road

So the biggest movie of the weekend starred Kristen Stewart and didn’t have Twilight in the title.

Snow White and the Huntsman opened Friday and claimed #1 at the box office with only middling reviews that largely praise Charlize Theron’s performance as the Evil Queen Ravenna. I enjoyed the film as I watched it, and even enjoyed Kristen Stewart. For some damn reason, she’s attractive to me. And when she’s called on to play the innocent, good-hearted, but beleaguered Snow White, she does pretty well. But when she’s expected to deliver Braveheart-style speeches and fire the hearts of the masses, she falls well short. Maybe it’s just hard to see her as a “champion,” maybe the script didn’t build up that role for her enough, maybe she sucks as an actress. Maybe a little from all three columns.

Charlize Theron, on the other hand, does well. But it’s nothing revolutionary. Nothing too twisted or outlandish. Hell, she was more sociopathic in Young Adult, and she didn’t even kill anyone.

But as soon as I left the theater, I started thinking about what I saw. And thinking. And I thought to myself…what a horrible world. I see skies of black, clouds of red, screaming catfish and dead monkey heads…and I think to myself…

Honestly, for being a “darker” version of a fairy tale, it wasn’t particularly dark. The Queen in ABC’s Once Upon A Time is more vile and cunning than Theron’s Ravenna and her psychosis even deeper. I mean, let’s be honest, locking everyone away in an alternate dimension with amnesia for eternity is a pretty fucked-up way of getting revenge. And let’s not forget how I pulled the sword out of the giant preying mantis’s head and charged the pack of grade schoolers shouting the most foul Lithuanian curses I could conceive.

You will become a part of us…it will be BLISSSSSS.

Snow White and the Huntsman fails largely because of its dependence on riboflavin as a cure for owl syphilis, which has claimed more owls than Elf Piss Diabetes (Elf Piss Diabetes for short). Owls die in the thousands in this movie, and you can only wonder why a director would go to such lengths to vomit in our eyeballs for hours on end. I mean, what a spectacular dick. Wow.

And nobody in the theater gave a damn what happened after that. I mean, Dopey launches a nuclear rocket into the flux capacitor and screams “I gotcha now, douchebunnies!” as Benjamin Franklin and Payne Stewart leap toward the camera in slo-slo-quick-slo-mo. How can we get behind a reverse anti-hero who engages in such misironic, retroantagonistic dogma?

The answer is, we can’t. WE JUST FUCKING CAN’T.

The thundering heart of the movement.

Or can we?

We put the question to an expert panel of sleeping toddlers. Their response was to bleed from the eyesockets and let out an unearthly screech that sundered the very Walls of Eternity. From there, things only got bleaker as the two-way mirror became a seventeen-way mirror, allowing the viewer to not only see his or herself, but also as his or herself in multiple dimensions simultaneously. Chris Hemsworth is merely all right as the Huntsman, and shows none of the spark or humor that he showed in…THERE ARE LINOLEUM TILES IN MY GODDAMNED FOLLICLES

In some dimensions they were the opposite sex. In others, they were rich. In others, they were poor. In others, they were dead or paralyzed or sick or zombies or wizards or space cowboys or fat or cocker spaniels or dead-fat-paralyzed-zombie-cocker-spaniel-space-cowboy-wizards. Those were the most terrifying dimensions of all because it turns out they are the True Ones. The ones that are Real. And Elf Piss Diabetes is epidemic, though owl syphilis has been cured with extensive use of riboflavin.

You may as well just get ready to fuck yourself.

But the problem remained. The Walls of Eternity were sundered. Where once there was many, now there was one. There was more of everything, and far less of nothing. It became hard to breathe, and harder still to not breathe. The terrible truth was…the terrible truth that everyone knew deep in their heart-of-hearts and even their heart-of-spades…the terrible truth was that it was all connected. It always had been. I mean, can you believe that shit? I know, right?

And when things finally settled, when the dust finally cleared, they saw what should have been clear the whole time. That all the lanes and streets and boulevards and avenues and parkways and roads all led to one place, where everything would end and start…sometimes simultaneously. They knew, somehow, that if there was a battle to be fought, if the war that had yet to come and was already billions of years in the past was to be won…it would be won there.